A Tasty Pi Day Hypothetical; MIT's Synthesizer of the Gods

We realize there's only so much time one can spend in a day watching new trailers, viral video clips, and shaky cell phone footage of people arguing on live television. This is why every day The Atlantic Wire highlights the videos that truly earn your five minutes (or less) of attention. Today: Shakespeare may hiding in Pi, how to play the world's largest synthesizer, and a Sarah Palin-Julianne Moore tale of the tape.

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Today is Pi Day. Happy Pi Day! Did you know that because Pi is endless, all of Shakespeare's plays could conceivably be stumbled upon, assuming you remembered to develop a basic substitution cipher before you started counting decimals. Which means you could -- could -- find just about anything in Pi, if you have a system: the starting offensive line for the 1991 Washington Redskins, the complete text of the stories in Hemingway's lost suitcase, this bloghand's PIN number. Anything, anything at all. [Vi Hart]

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We're still in that stage where we will stop on Game Change while flipping through the channels, just to marvel at Julianne Moore's uncanny channeling of Sarah Palin. The fact that she did it without sounding all that much like Sarah Palin -- as this side-by-comparison of key speeches in the film with their real-life inspiration shows -- makes it all the more impressive. Moore didn't load her iPod with wall-to-wall speeches from the former Alaska governor to become a better mimic: It was about understanding the person she was playing. See, acting is much harder than we give it credit for being. [via Boing Boing]

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Who would want to own the world's largest synthesizer? NBC Sports circa 1988, for one. Also, MIT, which has the good fortune to actually own the world's largest synthesizer, and the basic decency to explain to the rest of us how they go about playing it. Just listening to it has us itching to write a pilot for a highly stylized police procedural where the line between cop and crook is increasingly blurred [MIT via The Hairpin]

Finally, briefly: Minnesota Timberwolves rookie point guard suffered a cataclysmic knee injury last week that had us worried, because we've had a cataclysmic knee injury before, and know it's no fun. Then we saw him riding a motorized scooted around a Twin Cities hardware store (we think), carrying a broom, and it made us feel briefly, momentarily, undeniably better. [Yrekyert via The Basketball Jones]